HP Offers AMD Sempron Chips for 939-pin Infrastructure

Advanced Micro Devices currently officially supplies its AMD Sempron microprocessor family for cost-effective desktops only for Socket A and Socket 754 infrastructures, but it seems that the company provides some of its clients more advanced AMD Sempron products for Socket 939 mainboards.

HP recently started to offer AMD-based business desktops HP dx5150 which are equipped with ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 mainboard with integrated RADEON X300-like graphics core and are intended for AMD Athlon 64 processors with model numbers up to 4000+, which indicates 939-pin form-factor. On its web-site the company offers its clients to choose not only among AMD Athlon 64 chips, but also among AMD Sempron 3000+ and 3200+.

At this time AMD does not officially list AMD Sempron processors with 3000+ and 3200+ for Socket 939. While AMD Sempron 3000+ chip is available for Socket A and Socket 754, AMD Sempron 3200+ product is not listed anywhere at AMD web-site.

AMD processors in PGA939 form-factor integrate dual-channel PC3200 memory controller, which provides up to 6.40GB/s memory bandwidth, while PGA754 chips sport only single-channel PC3200 memory controller that can pump up to 3.20GB of data per second. Naturally, AMD64 products with dual-channel memory controllers are faster compared to those that are equipped with single-channel memory controllers at the same clock-speed with the same amount of cache memory. In addition, all PGA939 chips are designed for 1000MHz HyperTransport bus, faster compared to the HT bus of PGA754 chips.

AMD’s current top AMD Sempron 3300 processors for Socket 754 operate at 2.0GHz, integrate 128KB of L2 cache and may provide SSE3 support.

Specifications of AMD Sempron 3000+, 3200 chips for Socket 939 are unclear. It is also unknown when such chips are expected to be available in retail.